Here’s an uncomfortable juxtaposition of stories about white supremacy.
The first is from page 90-91 of “The Children” by David Halberstam. It is an account of the stories the students in his non-violence workshops told as they were trying to decide what to do for their first civil rights protest project.
“Somebody else told the story of a Fisk biology professor named Mildred Ray who had gone downtown on a summer day with her five-year-old son and had gone to a small juice bar near Fifth Avenue and Church to get an orange juice. The little boy had gotten up on a stool, when the counter man had said very angrily, ‘Get that (N-word) kid off that stool!’ If you are the mother, the woman said, what do you tell the child at that point? How do you heal the wound? Does it ever heal?”
That story and others like it led to the Nashville sit-ins that helped integrate store lunch counters and laid the groundwork for the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was a force in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
That was a different time and a different place, but here’s another story from our time and our place. This one was told by a Homewood couple at a District 153 Board of Education meeting March 10.
Jamilah Doyle-Walters and Randall Walters reported to the board an incident that happened to their daughter in February at Willow School.
“While enjoying her lunch with friends, one of her classmates randomly stated she looked like a monkey like Barack Obama,” Doyle-Walters said. “He also wished that segregation and slavery returned and he would capture and torture her.
“Regardless if these are the thoughts of this young man or his parents, I need for both parties to know that I’ll not tolerate this and this will not be tolerated in this community. My daughter stated prior to this event that her neighborhood was safe and kind. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case. She now knows that bad people do exist. My husband and I sent our daughter to school whole, only for her to return broken, broken and left for repairs that only our love can mend.”
Randall Walters joined his wife in questioning the district’s response to the incident. He questioned why school officials suggested his daughter move to a different class.
“She did nothing wrong. Why should she have to leave a class that she loves her teacher, she loves her classmates,” he said.
Their primary concern is the safety of their daughter, who as of mid-March, was still in the same classroom (but kept separate from) as the boy who made the comments.
Superintendent Scott McAlister did not respond to a my request for an interview. District officials cannot discuss publicly disciplinary action for specific students, but I was hoping to get a better understanding of how the district deals with incidents that have racist elements.
In addition to whatever response the district makes to this incident, it is also a community problem.
Homewood and Flossmoor pride themselves not just on the diversity of the villages but on the community commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. The Trump administration’s aggressive rollback of DEI progress has not made a dent, so far, in that commitment. I have never heard a local leader give anything less than an enthusiastic endorsement of DEI values.
We have to recognize, though, that our well-earned reputation as an inclusive community does not mean we’re immune to racism. A few examples:
In 2017, Action for a Better Tomorrow held a vigil in Irwin Park to express sorrow and outrage at the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a white nationalist plowed a vehicle into counter-protesters, killing one woman and injuring 19 others.
A woman in the crowd told me her granddaughter, a student at a Homewood elementary school, was told by a classmate that his parents told him he couldn’t be her friend because she was Black.
In 2019, four H-F High students donned blackface and harassed a Black fast food worker in Homewood.
The incident sparked a student walkout and march at the high school. A community member convened a town hall forum at Flossmoor Community Church that attracted a big, diverse crowd (even Jesse Jackson Sr. attended) for a conversation about how to address racism in the community. It was promoted as the first of many.
It was the first of one.
In 2022, white Flossmoor police officers killed a Black woman, Madeline Miller, sparking months of protests by anti-police violence activists. In October of that year, Flossmoor held a community forum to promote healing and improve community-police relations. It was promoted as the first of many.
It was the first of one.
In 2024, when Flossmoor fired its first Black police chief, residents filled the village hall board room for several successive meetings to question the decision and to express their sense that race was a factor.
There was no community forum to address the concerns about race in the Jones firing, but the subject has been raised at a number of candidate forums in recent weeks.
There’s a discernable pattern at work here, and it’s not specific to H-F. It’s a pattern imprinted on U.S. history. When there are conscience-jarring racial incidents, people pledge to do better. There’s progress. Then attention fades and follow-up ebbs.
The emotion-choked voice of a young mother telling the story of her daughter being subjected to violent racial comments in a local elementary school ought to be one of those jarring moments. The story was posted on a popular Facebook group, and sure, everyone expressed sympathy for the family and outrage over the boy’s behavior. But what will that mean if we simply follow the pattern?
I think it’s past time for sustained attention, conversation and action about race. I’m not alone in thinking so. Candidates in the April 1 election have been talking about race during campaign events in recent weeks.
A number of candidates, especially some of those running for Flossmoor Board of Trustees, are quite ready to keep the subject on the table. I encourage folks to watch the election videos on the Chronicle’s YouTube channel to hear what the candidates are saying.
As a diverse community with a commitment to DEI, we might be almost uniquely qualified to face racism head-on and make a real difference in the world.